Leila And Khaled

By (author) Matuk Nyla
Description:

A decolonial vacation romance between two Palestinians—one raised in exile, the other rooted on the land—searching for home in each other.

Leila, a Palestinian Canadian film scholar, joins a delegation of academics on her first journey to Occupied Palestine. What begins as an intellectual pilgrimage becomes an intimate, destabilizing return to an ancestral land her family was exiled from. There, she meets Khaled—a younger Palestinian man who pulls her into a mesmeric trance of desire, curiosity, and confrontation. Their brief charged affair unfolds in a landscape shaped by rupture and resistance, each of them bearing different inheritances of the same loss.

One night in Khaled’s hotel room, Leila listens as he recounts a harrowing confrontation with a former paramilitary who participated in the Nakba of 1948. The conversation cracks open buried grief and fury, bringing history violently into the present.

Leila and Khaled is a love story and a reckoning—a lyrical, unflinching meditation on belonging, memory, and the enduring wounds of colonialism.

Review quote:

“Leila & Khaled is a highly realistic novel, a love affair superimposed on some of the most contested territory in the world.” — California Review of Books

Biographical note:
NYLA MATUK was born in Winnipeg and lives in Montreal. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry: Sumptuary Laws, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, and Stranger. She is also the editor of an anthology of poems, Resisting Canada.
Endorsement:
“Leila and Khaled is a true rarity: it is a story of a torrid, deeply felt romance that is also among the starkest interrogations of the gruesome politics of both the world and our own selves. Nyla Matuk has gifted us a narrator striking in her intelligence and willingness to chase understanding, whether she is tracking the intricacies of contemporary Palestine through the vehicle of an academic tour or meditating on the persistence of art amid destruction. Brimming with erudition and luxuriously researched history, this novel is a daring narrative gambit that asks: Can you withstand a Palestinian wresting away the permission to narrate?” —Saeed Teebi, author of Her First Palestinian 

Endorsement:
“A torrid, deeply felt romance … Brimming with erudition and luxuriously researched history.” —Saeed Teebi, author of Her First Palestinian

Feature:

• PERMISSION TO NARRATE: Author Nyla Matuk is Palestinian-Canadian, with a perspective shaped by lived experience, cultural memory, and political urgency. A powerful contribution to Palestinian diasporic literature, Leila and Khaled resists traditional narratives about identity, desire, and resistance.
• DECOLONIAL LITERATURE: For fans of Noor Naga, Isbaella Hammad, and Saeed Teebi, Nyla Matuk''s debut novel challenges settler narratives, embraces Middle Eastern identity, and reclaims the right to self-definition. Leila and Khaled disrupts colonial frameworks and offers a deeply personal counter-narrative to dominant histories.
• CINEMATIC LOVE STORY: With richly poetic language, visual metaphors, and layered reflection, Leila and Khaled is a lyrical romance where desire is entangled with grief, history, and political reality.